Panini Publishing The Tides of Time A Graphic Novel Collection

Written by	Steve Parkhouse
Drawn by	Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, Mick Austin, Steve Dillon
Published	2005
ISBN	1 904159 92 3

• A Review by John Seavey
• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by John Seavey 5/8/05

Hmm... probably going to upset a few applecarts by saying this, but... um...

These really aren't very good Doctor Who stories. They might be good stories if you ignore the fact that they're meant to be Doctor Who stories, and treat him as an interesting incidental character, but I couldn't do that.

OK, for clarity's sake, I should point out which ones they are. The Tides of Time, Panini's new trade paperback, collects The Tides of Time, Stars Fell on Stockbridge, The Stockbridge Horror, The Lunar Lagoon, 4-Dimensional Vistas, The Moderator, and Timeslip. All of them, excepting Timeslip, were written by Steve Parkhouse, and he really doesn't seem to care about the Doctor that much. You get the feeling that if he could, he'd happily ditch the Doctor and make this all about his own characters.

And they're great, don't get me wrong. I remembered the stories fondly from when I was a kid, because I thought Shayde and Sir Justin were neat, and they still are now that I'm grown up. But, well... Shayde and Sir Justin (and Gus and the members of SAG 3 and Merlin) are the main characters. They do all the heavy lifting, plot- wise, they defeat the villains (most of the time)... really, it seems like all they rely on the Doctor for is transport. He's not a Time Lord, he's a Number Three bus. (The Doctor does defeat one of the four villains in question, but makes up for that with his spectacular incompetence in supposedly "investigating" a mysterious time anomaly in the Antarctic by playing cricket in an English village and fishing in the Pacific. It'd be better for there to have been no linking retcon than one that makes the Doctor look like the dimmest individual to walk the planet.)

There's a phrase in the TV industry for this, which I learned from John Rogers -- "sucking the day player crack pipe". It means, being so much more into your own characters than the regular leads that you start focusing the story on them and ignoring the boring people you're stuck with, since you know everyone'll love them anyway.

In fact, you get the feeling Parkhouse isn't really familiar with Doctor Who at all. He comes up with most of his own mythos, and his only use of recurring villains is a reluctant-seeming team-up between the Ice Warriors and the Meddling Monk (or, as Parkhouse seems to think he's called, "The Time Meddler". If he's going to name villains after the first TV episode they appeared in, though, it could be worse. He could have used the more famous renegade Time Lord, "Terror of the Autons".) He makes the Monk's TARDIS look like a police box as well, like that's their natural shape -- which renders the chase/dogfight in the Vortex the most confusing damned thing ever written in comics.

I should probably be more charitable to these stories. While Parkhouse doesn't seem interested in Doctor Who, he does put a lot of style and imagination into his own, new stuff... it just never really seems like he wants the Doctor to be there. And for a collection that has "Doctor Who" right on the cover, that seems to be a pretty fatal flaw.

A Review by Finn Clark 16/8/05

Bloody hell. This isn't the complete Steve Parkhouse opus... it omits his initial run with Tom Baker (see the Dragon's Claw graphic collection) and his Colin Baker stories (collected many years ago in the Voyager graphic novel), but it's the bulk of it. For the full experience you should ideally start reading at The Deal (DWM 53) and not stop before Once Upon A Time-Lord (DWM 98-99), but this is more than I'd dreamed of seeing in one collection. All of Parkhouse's Davison strips. Wow.

I've previously reviewed all of these stories individually, but when it comes to Parkhouse and Davison there's always more to say. These aren't "just comic strips". By this point Parkhouse was working in eight-month chunks (a short prologue and a mega-epic), but that's only the beginning. Each story dovetails with the next. There's foreshadowing, recurring characters, mythology, tragedy and horror. In one sense it's a shame that Voyager isn't included here, since without it Parkhouse's run loses some shape. The Tides of Time allows his imagination full rein, but after that the stories turn in more straightforward SF directions. Admittedly even something as hard-edged and industrial as The Moderator has Parkhouse's unmistakable fingerprints all over it, but it wasn't until Colin Baker and John Ridgway that Parkhouse really let loose with the fantasy again.

In some ways it's Lawrence Miles before his time. Parkhouse's Time Lords are gods in a universe that literally contains demons (Melanicus). There's a team-up of the Meddling Monk and the Ice Warriors... but it's a four-dimensional alliance that splits reality, spanning five million years and a myriad Earths.

There's tragedy, in a way that's so Davison it hurts. There's death, including (but not restricted to) companions... but with Parkhouse's acid wit never far away. You could cry for this Doctor. In my opinion, in all the years since 1982 only two people ever nailed the fifth Doctor... Peter Davison himself, and Steve Parkhouse. (Parkhouse's versions of Tom and Colin Baker are good without being outstanding, but his Davison is perfect. It's certainly miles ahead of Eric Saward's!)

The artwork deserves a mention. Here you'll find Dave Gibbons (we are not worthy!), Steve Parkhouse himself (yes, he can draw too), Mick Austin (whom I rather like) and Steve Dillon (Judge Dredd, Hellblazer, Preacher, Punisher). We also have Paul Neary on inks for two-thirds of The Stockbridge Horror, but both Parkhouse and Austin look better when they're inking their own work. Austin in particular isn't much of a draughtsman but an absolutely beautiful inker... his snowscapes and Ice Warriors are a joy to behold. He gets some fantastic likenesses too.

This book is huge, both in importance and sheer page count. Clocking in at 226 pages, this would be a bargain at double the price (i.e. thirty quid). There's even a bonus inclusion of Timeslip (DWW 17-18), the Tom Baker fill-in strip that was omitted from the previous two volumes. Actually I'm delighted to see it. I've always enjoyed Timeslip, slight though it is, but more importantly it feels wrong for definitive archive collections to omit random stories. (As an aside, this graphic novel thus stars all of the first five Doctors.)

Incidentally the last two Davison stories, 4-Dimensional Vistas and The Moderator, have never been reprinted before. That's nearly a year of DWM's comic strip! Classic Comics stopped at The Stockbridge Horror and the colourised US reprints stopped at Lunar Lagoon. There's also a clever solution to the problem of Dave Gibbons's painted colour spread in The Tides of Time part six... they've printed it twice. It's black-and-white in the main body of the book, but on the inside back and front covers you'll find it in colour.

These stories have everything. They're as tragic, witty and breathtaking as the best Doctor Who should be. If you haven't yet read them, do so. Now. It's as simple as that.